Surf, man. From the outside, our favorite
pastime, this Sport of Queens, appears a bucolic dopamine
booster that fosters “good vibes.” Bobbing out in the gorgeous
seas, kissed by the sun itself, being all healthy and fit and
blessed. Inside, though, we all know that it is a toxic stew where
no fight is too petty, no beef too small. Or big and meaningful, I
suppose. Surfers will shred each other over, well, anything
including, but not limited to, the usage of busty gals in marketing
materials.
There was once a time, you certainly recall, when bikini
contests were ubiquitous at surf affairs. Exclusively women, back
then, standing on a makeshift beach stage wearing revealing
swimwear whilst men, strangling warm-ish cans of Bud Light, would
hoot and holler and slobber misogynist slobber.
Thankfully, culture matured and surf brands moved with the tide,
sponsoring women who actually surf too.
Well, culture continued to mature, the surf brands became
irrelevant and a giant New York managing firms purchased them all
for a song. The houses of Quiksilver, RVCA, DC, Dakine, Billabong
all under one roof. Team members shredded, t-shirts dumped into
Costco and, in Billabong’s case, the mothballed busty gals rolled
back out for a trot.
This time around, though, there is a surf feminist hero around
to give hell and Lucy Small ain’t pulling no punches.
Taking to Instagram, the brave longboarder ripped into the
onetime legacy Australian label for its overt sexism, its dribbling
boorishness, pulling no punches. Small then followed with the
damning “sexist cycle of sport.”
The question, I suppose, is will the Park Avenue suits listen
and re-pivot to a celebration of sporting performance or double
down on smut?
What would you do if you were an Authentic Brands Group
executive vice president?
More as the story develops.
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Mark Occhilupo in Jack McCoy's 1999 epic The
Occumentary.
Interview: Jack McCoy on touring seminal
film The Occumentary with “cross-dressing Italian Scotsman from
Kurnell”!
"If people are coming to see high-definition don't
bother. Because this is film! It's got grain! It's got life to
it!"
It might be real hard to believe, and such is the
passage of time, but Mark Occhilupo is a couple of years off
turning sixty and it’s been a quarter century since he won
his historic world title in 1999.
To celebrate the milestone, Occ, who described himself in a Sean
Doherty profile as a “little cross-dressing Italian
Scotsman from Kurnell”, and the film’s creator Jack
McCoy, are touring the seminal film The
Occumentary along the east coast of Australia in
May.
Apart from one initial screening of The Occumentary, it’ll be
the first time the film has been seen in cinemas. McCoy says he’s
spent “hundreds of hours” turning the film from its VHS-friendly
4:3 aspect to big-screen 16:9.
“If people are coming to see high-definition don’t bother.
Because this is film! It’s got grain! It’s got life to it!” McCoy
tells me from his farm on the mid-North Coast (geographic specifics
he asks me not to mention, but it’s a pretty forty acres a few
minutes from real fun warm-water waves).
The tour will be in McCoy’s usual format, lives stories, unseen
clips, question sessions slated for thirty minutes that go for way
longer ’cause everyone in the theatre is enthralled by the
electricity of sitting among legends.
Anyway, I say to Jack, oowee, can you believe Occ is nearly
sixty (Jack turns seventy-six this year, his first big film Tubular
Swells hit screens in 1975)?
“Well, he’s my son, you know, as he gets older so do I,”
he laughs. “But, I don’t have to tell you, he’s one of a kind. He’s
fit and strong and clean and he just gets better with age. The only
thing that doesn’t age is his childlike mind.”
Jack tells an excellent anecdote of Occ drinking vodka out of a
coconut that he bought off a street vendor in Rio while he watched
the heat that would decide whether or not he’d be the champ.
“You gotta come to the show to hear the end of it,” says Jack.
“Unless you got Google.”
Jack famously got Occ, who ballooned out to three hundred
pounds, off the couch in 1995 and back in training. There’s a great
sequence of bubble Occ throwing buckets in The Occumentary.
“And the judges didn’t even have a pen and paper,” says Jack.
“At the end, they came to a consensus as to who was the winner.
When good surfers watch a heat, even if it’s close, they can tell
you in what order who the best guys were.”
Jack says it’s a system that works better than the usual way of
scoring heats in the pro game.
“The general public doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Oh, he
needs a three point two to combo a five point six, this and that.
The guy rides a wave and you can’t tell the difference. I had an
event that took care of those things. The Billabong Challenge was
as good a templet for a contest as there ever was.”
He reminds me of his and Derek Hynd’s rebel tour in 2001 that
included Kelly Slater and Andy Irons.
“We had a tour that was ready to go and then 9/11 came and it
closed down all sport and it had a major impact on economies around
the world,” says Jack.
“It was a limited number of surfers who would be the upper
echelon with the ASP kept as a feeding ground. The art of surfing
instead of the sport of surfing. It wasn’t like we were trying to
take over the ASP (now the WSL). We were trying to set a different
course for surfing that wasn’t… (Jack takes a long theatrical
yawn)… let me yawn here, typical event.”
Wednesday, May 1 – The J, Noosa
Thursday, May 2 – Byron Theatre, Byron Bay
Sunday, May 5 – HOTA, Gold Coast
Wednesday, May 8 – Gala Cinema, Wollongong
Thursday, May 9 – Event Cinema, Newcastle
Friday, May 10 – Orpheum Cinema, Sydney
Saturday, May 11 – Avoca Beach Theatre, Central Coast
Wednesday, May 15 – Astor Theatre, Melbourne
Friday May, 17 – Lorne Theatre, Surf Coast
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Wilbur, left, in the nineteen nineties and, right,
reimagined for France's surf Olympians.
Controversy and shock as France unveils
surf team’s Paris 2024 outfits
Ashpool used the ol red-white-and-blue, the colours of the
tricolour, but merged the colours into a gradient to reflect, he
says, “a sense of diversity in colour, but also diversity in the
body.”
The designer says France’s diversity ain’t always obvious on TV
and films there, which is true.
Watch a French film, which are among the worst in the world, and
you’d think the joint was filled with middle-class whites in fitted
raw denim, tight pale blue shirts and brown boots, not the
cornucopia of African and Arabic culture that it really
is.
The beautifully named Le Coq Sportif, the athletic rooster, have
made the outfits but one set stood out, the surf team’s nod to kook
chic.
The unfortunate model, pictured below, red hair permed and dyed
yellow, beard its natural red, stands, belly out, in the white rash
shirt and knee-length trunks, surfboard held non-ironically with
tail scraping the ground.
A necklace and Oakley Blades completes an ensemble that hasn’t
been seen in the surf world since Wilbur Kookmeyer was a staple of
surf culture.
France reimagines surf culture with controversial
uniform for country’s Olympic surf team.
But is it the worst Olympic uniform ever?
Crappier than the Spaniards’s Maccas-themed gear in 2012 or
Canada’s gay cowboy look at Calgary, 1988?
The French team is a dark horse fav to win double gold at
Teahupoo in July.
It includes Tahitians Kauli Vaast and Vahine Fierro, as well as
Hossegor’s Joan Duru and Johanne Defay from Renton Island. All of
‘em know how to thread a tube.
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With Surfline down, account managers entirely confused
as to "when to go."
World’s largest surf website collapses as
conspiracy theories swirl!
Surfline has long been the gold standard of
surf websites. The tool, which started as a lowly pay-per-call
phone line, transformed itself into a dominant force at the dawn of
the internet age and is now the ubiquitous face of “knowing when to
go” what with account managers from Malibu to Manasquan logging on
to check camera angles of where they might be surfing if they
weren’t managing accounts.
The Huntington Beach-based behemoth received a $30 million investment from
the Chernin Group in 2020, became the “official
forecasting partner” of the World Surf League soon thereafter and
brilliant bright skies all around.
All around, that is, until hours ago when the juggernaut
mysteriously disappeared from computer and phone screens
worldwide.
Account managers met with an ominous message declaring “Internal
Server Error” and mansplaining “Looks like we’re having a few
issues here, thanks for noticing. Rest assured we’ve been notified
of this problem.”
Except rest was all but assured and as happens in this day and
age, theories immediately floated as to the cause of those “few
issues.”
A powerful, though cloaked, surf voice openly wondered if the
problem was excellent surf in Los Angeles and Orange Counties,
California thereby forcing too many advertisements onto the server
and crashing the system. Others pondered that Surfline’s long
association with the aforementioned Huntington Beach had led to
cyber attacks. Surf City, USA, as you might know, has recently
pivoted to a culture war zone where breast cancer survivors are
routinely harassed.
Whatever the reason, many hundreds, if not thousands, were made
very sad.
Were you among them?
What is your assumption as to what went wrong?
Please share.
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Channel Islands team rider Dane Reynolds
exhibits stunning acting skills in hilarious new board promo.
Channel Islands astounds surf watchers by
releasing funniest skit since Doped Youth!
Channel Islands is as blue
chip a surf brand as there ever was. Fine boards from the
mind, though the hands, of the legendary Al Merrick that made Kelly
Slater a household name and the tri hexagon logo a symbol of
desire, of excellence. That heritage passed down to son Britt who,
along with Channel Islands’ rider-owners, has continued to push
innovation and style.
Three years ago, Britt Merrick and senior members of the Channel
Islands management team, employees and teamriders bought back the
Channel Islands brand from Burton snowboards.
“We look forward to the day when CI returns home to the Merrick
family, and we know the brand will be in good hands with Britt
Merrick, Scott Anderson and the dedicated employees and teamriders
at Channel Islands,” said Burton owner Donna Carpenter.
Peak cool.
But who imagined the team at Channel Islands had the capability
of delivering the funniest surf skit since Adam Blakey’s Doped
Youth?
No, not me but here we are and watch this gorgeous shot over
Filipe Toledo’s bow.
Teahupo’o, here we come.
And, in case you missed it twenty years back, a little flashback
to Doped Youth.
